Are all MMOs just extended vaporware?
by James Egan 
Nov 2nd 2008 at 1:00PM
Filed under: Fantasy, Horror, Fury, MMO industry, Opinion, Hellgate: London
Massively multiplayer online games can be a difficult industry to break into and succeed. For every Blizzard or Sony Online Entertainment, there are several smaller companies brimming with ideas about how to inject change into the MMO market. Some succeed by breaking from the World of Warcraft paradigm. Most do not. Writer James Matson writes about these titles that begin full of promise but ultimately meet a chilly reception by MMO gamers, in an article at Atomic. He touches on the fact that the sometimes high price of the box sale paired with monthly MMO fees, sustained over some months, leads to some serious disappointment when the MMO fails and the servers go dark. Matson specifically cites the examples of Auran's Fury and (what is currently Namco-Bandai's) Hellgate: London. "This would appear to the be the first tendrils of a new kind of gaming plague that's arrived with MMOs, games that can be rendered useless due to mismanagement, poor sales or just bad luck," Matson writes.
While he concedes it may be a selfish sentiment, Matson wonders if the numerous MMOs that fold, with respective IPs that simply disappear, should release their server side source code as freeware. "Wouldn't it be one last, great act of kindness to throw the server software out to those gamers that did support the title from start to fire and brimstone finish?... Either way, I'm left pondering the whole deal as my coffee table gets yet another kitsch drink coaster that looks suspiciously like a PC DVD."
What about you? Do you think it's a shame these IPs simply fade away, or do you think there's still life in the IP of a failed MMO that can be spun off in the future?
[Via Slashdot]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
colin said on 2:09PM 11-02-2008
From what I have seen over the years when an mmorpg has a bad launch or fails, its dead forever, end of story. (except the ones that are on "life support")
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possum said on 5:41PM 11-02-2008
The equation for a successful MMO is very very simple, dont lie to your beta testers and player base.
Some may think lie a strong term to use, its not, Devs will call it patching, CSM"S will call it improvements, the word promise is but a feature word used by the devs for spin, the bottom line is what the devs say and what they deliver are ALWAYS different.
The spokesman for a particular MMO must have several things going for them, integrity, the ability to tell suits to shove it when needed and not worry about losing their job, knowledge about what they are talking about and customer relations honesty.
There are too many examples of MMO's with potential, failing because the beta testers were strung along, the playerbase was lied to prior to launch to get sales numbers and then the rampant patching and excuses, followed shortly by the downword spiral, but hey, they got your money didnt they?
WOW? its a mutant, easy to play, people wont quit because of time invested, sad, no one with balls save a few of us not playing anything right now demanding a decent MMO and developers with the balls to be honest in this screwed up market.
The situation is simple; keep your mouths shut developers if you cant deliver what you promise, dont lie to get sales, sadly there are always a percentage that will buy into it.
**no anger here if anyone is wondering about my attitude, just stating vanilla facts alot of folks have experianced (grin)**
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rocknerd said on 6:26PM 11-02-2008
the problem with MMOs is, theres TOO MUCH thinking going on with them. the reviews, the previews, the community, the developers...
heres one question that matters, its the only question that matters.
is the MMO fun???
and as to the the topic of this MMO question, YES. all MMOs will be vaporware at some point. unfortunately i have yet to see an MMO close down and release the server software which i think they SHOULD DO, if we are paying full price for a box!!! if we were just renting a service for 10-15$ a month without the purchase of a box, i could understand not getting anything after the service goes down. but when you make that initial investment with an MMO of 50$ you kind of want something that will last forever. i can still go back and play baldur's gate or fallout. but what about auto assault or asheron's call 2??? what about the people that paid 50$ for the box with the software in it? Bad investment. im now less likely to buy these boxed games not knowing their future when, if i learned "IF and WHEN" the official servers ever shut down, i would be able to DL the server software and play with some friends at a LAN or set it up on an extra PC in my house...
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DeathMutant said on 11:20AM 11-03-2008
I imagine that the server-side software of most MMOGs not only requires special hardware, multiple physical servers running different process (logon, shared zone, instances, etc.) but, most likely, runs on a some variant of UNIX. In other words, probably *not* something you could run on your extra machines at home. I wish it was as simple as hosting a NWN server. . .
Now if MMOG developer/publisher would sell the rights to host/operate "abandoned" MMOGs to 3rd parties they *might* be able to keep them on "life support" for a longer period of time due to lower overhead. This would mean no (or fewer) software patches and no (or little) new content but at least the players could still play. They could charge a monthly subscription but it would have to be significantly reduced due to the game being in a maintenance mode with no signficant new development.
recursive said on 6:46PM 11-02-2008
No, because that's not the definition of vaporware. But yeah, everything's finite, including MMOs. Whether the IP lives on.. well we haven't seen it do that yet. But it could, there's tie-ins to lots of other things these days as well. And of course some MMOs are based off an IP, which will carry on.
"Games that can be rendered useless due to mismanagement, poor sales or just bad luck" goes for offline games and, frankly, any product out there as well. That's not exclusive to MMOs. In fact, not a lot is, however serious we take ourselves.
The releasing sourcecode so the game can live on is a nice idea, but it's not always viable in reality. I don't think there's a lot of MMOs out there who own everything they've used, plus it sort of cuts off the means to give the IP another profit-aimed shot. Which unfortunately still is where any serious content development has to be coming from.
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